Has Anyone Seen My Toes?

By Christopher Buckley

From the bestselling author of Thank You for Smoking and Make Russia Great Again comes a comic tour de force, the story of one man’s “lively and funny” (New York Journal of Books) journey through lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic.

During the pandemic, an aging screenwriter is holed up in a coastal South Carolina town with his beloved second wife, Peaches. He’s been binge-eating for a year and developed a notable rapport with the local fast-food chain Hippo King. He struggles to work—on a ludicrous screenplay about a Nazi attempt to kidnap FDR and, naturally, an article for Etymology Today on English words of Carthaginian origin. He’s told Peaches so often about the origins of the word mayonnaise that she’s developed an aversion to using the condiment. He thinks he has Covid. His wife thinks he is losing his mind. In short, your typical pandemic worries. Things were going from bad to worse even before his doctor suggested a battery of brain tests. He knows what that means: dementia!

But even in these scary times, there are plenty of things to do to distract him. His iPhone is fat-shaming him. He’s. been trying to read Proust and thinks the French novelist missed his true calling as a parfumier. And he’s discovered nefarious Russian influence on the local coroner’s face. Why is Putin so keen to control who decides who died peacefully and who by foul play in Pimento County. Could it be the local military base?

Has Anyone Seen My Toes? is a “laugh-out-loud” (Publishers Weekly) romp through a time that has been anything but funny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982198060

Christopher Buckley

Christopher Buckley is a novelist, essayist, humorist, critic, magazine editor, and memoirist. His books include Thank You for Smoking, The Judge Hunter, Make Russia Great Again, and The Relic Master. He worked as a merchant seaman and White House speechwriter. He was awarded the Thurber Prize for American Humor and the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

He shuffles to the bathroom scale and steps onto it with the enthusiasm of a man mounting the gallows. He imagines metallic groans, the sound of springs straining to their limit, the creak of timbers about to crack. But how can this be? It’s a high-tech scale, probably engineered by people whose native language is German and wear white laboratory gowns. It was a hint-hint present from his wife, Peaches. It tells you not only how much you weigh but also how much you weighed yesterday, and how many calories you can consume today in order to weigh less tomorrow. But all this is academic, for he cannot see the numbers, owing to the protuberance of his belly. Nor can he see his toes. Are they still there? He wriggles them. It feels as though they are, but that could be phantom limb syndrome, where you think you feel body parts no longer there. He cranes his head forward, as if trying to peek over the crest of a hill. Good news. The toes are there. But leaning forward on the scale shifts his weight, causing havoc in the scale’s delicate high-tech sensors. His weight fluctuates like a stock price on a day of wild market volatility.

Finally, the number stabilizes. Cue auto fat shaming. Did you really eat an entire family size bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups? After eating an entire supreme frozen pizza? You disgusting person. You pig.

Family size, supreme—labeling of distinctly deceptive American coinage. The embedded falsehood in family size is that this rucksack-like bag will be shared with the family. Supreme meanwhile connotes excellence and mastery, as in the Supreme Being, the highest court in the land, Julia Child’s signature chicken. Why shouldn’t a pizza loaded with pepperoni, sausage, prosciutto, onion, black olives, anchovy, jalapeño, and mushroom take its rightful place in the Valhalla of Supremacy?

On the bathroom floor by the scale, he sees an empty plastic wrapper perforated with bite marks. This sad relic contained the urgently needed Pepto-Bismol chewable tablets. This, too, has become a daily ritual: the 3 a.m. ingestion of pink bismuth to calm the roiling gastric seas. How has it come to this? Can everything be blamed on the pandemic?

He descends the staircase in a bathrobe and slippers. The day’s next defeat awaits him in the kitchen, but already he can feel the pounding rhythm—if it can be called that—of hip-hop booming from the Sonos speakers. SONOS. The name connotes a Greek deity, though he suspects it stands for Sporadically Operating Network of Sound. Whenever he wants it to play Bach or James Taylor, it refuses to cooperate. When his stepchildren want it to play rap, it works. At the moment, it is bellowing at him:

Oop, oop, we in da poop. Don’ wanna be, don’ lookit me, oop, oop…

His stepson, Themistocles, has yet again neglected to turn his music off before tumbling into the arms of Morpheus. Themistocles is, yes, an unusual name for an American lad; as are Clytemnestra and Atalanta, as two of his sisters are called. Another sister is more prosaically named Polly. Peaches’s first husband was Greek. On the arrival of their fourth child, Peaches finally put her foot down.

Now begins the ritual search for Them’s iPhone, from which the hellish din is issuing to the eight or however many Sonos speakers. He decides that the name cannot be an acronym. Sonos was surely a god of the underworld who tormented mortals with eternal unrest.

There is no point in attempting to roust Them from his sleep to ask him where his iPhone is. Them is uniquely gifted. He cannot be awakened by human device. As a child, he slept through a 7.4 earthquake. An exchange of nuclear weapons would not disturb his slumber.

A concavity in the sofa cushions indicates with a high degree of probability that the iPhone might be wedged between them. It is. Success. But such swift victories as this are rare. One morning, it took him half an hour to locate it. Them had left it in the freezer while rooting for a midnight snack.

He silences the hip-hop. He knows Them’s passcode, thank God. He briefly contemplates deleting his hip-hop playlist of 2,204 songs, but decides against it. Them can be very creative at payback. The last time he deleted one of his playlists, Them programmed his stepfather’s iPhone to shriek "Allahu akbar!" Them dropped him off at the airport, waited ten minutes, then phoned him. Caused quite the sensation as he was going through the TSA line.

Blessed silence. His rattled tympanic membranes make out the early morning chitter of birds, larks of varied feather rising from sullen earth at break of day to sing hymns at heaven’s gate.

But now comes the day’s third defeat. Lifting the carton of orange juice, he feels an unbearable lightness. Someone has drained it dry and replaced it, empty, in the fridge. Even the most impartial jury would convict Them on grounds of circumstantial evidence. Or would they, if they knew of his talent for retaliation?

Normally, he wouldn’t care about the OJ. But he’s reading a book on the Napoleonic Wars and last night came upon a lurid description of scurvy: rotting gums, teeth falling out, skittering about the deck like pebbles. The admiralty solved the problem by giving ship crews limes, from which we get the word limeys. He wonders if its near homonym blimey, Brit for expressing surprise or alarm (Blimey, not another story in the paper about Brexit), is a variant. He must look this up.

Etymology is a passion with him. He is known to accost strangers and ask, "Did you know that mayonnaise is one of the few words in the English language of Carthaginian origin?" Peaches and the four children have heard the etymology of mayonnaise so many times that they have developed an aversion to the real thing. He is aware that his wife and stepchildren do not share his ardor for word origins. He does try to restrain himself, but it’s not easy. Only yesterday, he learned the word petrichor and had to epoxy his lips shut, he so wanted to share it with them. The pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell. From the Greek petros (stone) and ichor (the fluid that supposedly flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology). Is this a great word, or what?

The day’s fourth existential defeat presents itself at the mailbox, where he goes to fetch his morning paper. A snake of impressive dimension has coiled itself around the post of the mailbox. He gets that this is South Carolina. Still. Until he married Peaches, he lived in latitudes where retrieving the paper did not entail risk of reptilian envenomation.

He cannot discern from its markings what variety of snake it is. South Carolina proudly boasts all five of North America’s venomous species. Whichever it is, this one appears to have a theatrical bent. It has coiled itself around the post, head facing out, forked tongue protruding, as if posing as a caduceus, the ancient symbol of healing. (From the Greek kerux, herald, but this is not the time for etymology.)

Honestly. The news these days is depressing enough without having to risk your life getting it. Nor does he relish becoming an item of local news himself.

RETIREE DOING BETTER AFTER COPPERHEAD BITE

Their friend Stonewall was bitten by a water moccasin. By the time he got to the ER, his leg was so swole up they had to cut his pants off. They injected him with antivenom (cost: $10,000), but this had the unfortunate side effect of stopping his heart. (The ultimate undesirable side effect.) Turned out Stoney is allergic to antivenom. Nearly a decade later, his leg still occasionally throbs. Stonewall has become a more reliable predictor of rain than Weather.com.

Shoo, he says to the snake, a feckless choice of words that moreover, makes no impression on it.

Look, he says in a manly way, fuck off. More assertive than shoo. But the snake remains unimpressed.

He is acutely conscious of the absurdity of his situation, standing here rotundly at the end of the driveway in slippers and bathrobe, trying to get a dialogue going with a passive-aggressive serpent of theatrical bent. Right about now the guys working on the new house down the street will be arriving. He must resolve this situation before they show up. How humiliating would that be: an old Yankee fatso in slippers and bathrobe dithering before a snake? One of them will drive up in his F-150, festooned with NRA, Nam Vet, Semper Fi, and MAGA decals. He’ll slow, take in the absurd spectacle of fatso Yankee and snake; grin, ask, Y’all need some assistance with that? He’ll rummage in the back of his pickup for the appropriate tool—machete, nail gun, M-16—and efficiently dispatch the snake. Mind if I keep it? My dogs love snake. Please. By all means.

But no one comes. He decides there is no dishonor in ceding the field of battle to a potentially lethal three-foot-long snake. This surely falls into the category of pick your own fights. He can read the news on his iPad. Still.

As he turns to begin his craven retreat, he notices that a sign has been planted on the neighbor’s property. He walks over to see what it says. A public service announcement, perhaps? Danger: Snakes! But no:

REELECT BOBBY BABCOCK CORONER

He was not aware that coroner is an elective office. He does know that the word derives from the Anglo-Norman French coruner. The coroner was the officer who safeguarded the king’s property, most important, his crown.

Since marrying Peaches and moving in with her here in Pimento, he’s made an effort to keep up with local elections for mayor, sheriff, country commissioner, and such. He takes democracy seriously. Look what happens when you don’t. Jury duty can be a bore, but it’s the least we owe the men who froze at Valley Forge during the bitter winter of 1777–78.

As he walks to the house, he wonders: What qualifications does one look for in a coroner?

He can’t recall seeing any other coroner-related campaign signs. Perhaps this Babcock person is running unopposed, but feels he should have some signs so folks won’t think he’s taking reelection for granted. Or maybe Mr. Babcock likes seeing his name in big letters on people’s lawns.

He continues his way to the house, keeping an eye peeled for other uliginous creatures. (Very useful word down here, uliginous: swampy, slimy, slithery. Faintly onomatopoeic.)

What qualities would he look for in a coroner? Some medical knowledge would be in order, so the coroner could determine if the deceased died of foul play. Doesn’t the smell of bitter almonds suggest cyanide poisoning? (Or is it arsenic? He must look this up. Just the sort of thing a coroner should know.)

What else? Punctuality. In TV crime shows, they’re always saying, We mustn’t move the body until the coroner gets here. So punctuality would definitely be an asset. Who wants to sit there all day with a body, waiting for a dilatory coroner? Not him.

"Where the heck is that coroner? It’s been over three hours now."

He doesn’t appear to be in any great hurry.

Serves us right. Everyone said, ‘For God’s sake, don’t elect Bobby Babcock. Ol’ Bobby would be late to his own inquest.’

The more he thinks about it, the more he realizes you don’t want just anyone as coroner.

CHAPTER 2

Pimento is excited to have its own Hippo King. It opened a few weeks ago, and ever since, the line for the drive-through has stretched out onto the highway. Aged Boomers are quipping, Just like Woodstock! Sheriff’s deputies are out every day, directing traffic and putting up cones. Not to detract from HK’s excellence, but the lines are in part due to all the restaurants closing because of the pandemic, or as folks here call it, the Kung Flu. He himself calls it the coronavirus.

He takes his place at the end of the line. There must be thirty cars ahead of him. Today is the first time he’s been back. He was here on opening day, but it was a disaster. When it came his turn to pick up his order at the window, the man handing it to him sneezed. The man was not wearing a face mask. Neither was he himself wearing a mask, because why would he need a face mask in the drive-through lane? This was no ordinary achoo-type sneeze. This was a thar she blows! Icelandic geyser–type nasal eruption. He had never seen a human being sneeze with such violence. How careless of him not to anticipate that being showered with millions of lethal airborne droplets is part of the HK experience. This week only, Hippo King customers will receive a fatal side order of coronavirus—at no extra charge!

He thought, Well, that’s it. I’m a dead man. And what will they say at my memorial service? He died as he lived, stuffing himself with Hippo burgers.

All thought of food abandoned, he screeched into an empty space in the HK parking lot, pulse pounding, and called Dr. Paula, his concierge doctor. Another uniquely American concept: fork over a $7,500 annual retainer, in return for which your doctor will actually take your call. Imagine—a doctor who’ll take your phone call. What’ll they think of next?

His wife, Peaches, is disdainful, indeed contemptuous of the arrangement. She views concierge doctors as mercenaries in white coats. He thinks this may have to do with her upbringing. Peaches is the youngest of eight. Her mother is not a Christian Scientist but might as well be. The children had to go to school unless they had fevers of 101 or were vomiting or bleeding. Mother did not believe in allergies. Nonsense! she declared. Then one of her kids was stung by a wasp and turned blue and couldn’t breathe. Even years later, she insists that his brush with death was probably due to something else. Peaches inherited her momma’s stoic ethic. When her own youngest, Polly, came home from soccer one Friday with an oddly angular forearm, Peaches ignored it until Polly’s whimpers became unignorable. At the ER, the nurse took one look at the arm and said matter-of-factly, It’s broken.

It must be stressed that despite this incident of appalling negligence, Peaches is a loving and attentive mother. Since that unhappy episode, she has moderated her Put on your big-girl panties and deal with it philosophy. Of the four children, Polly is the one who comes home least often. But she lives in Boston. The restaurant where she worked had to close owing to the pandemic. She’s writing a cookbook based on the television series Game of Thrones. On her last visit home, she made a lamprey pie. It was not improved by his launching into a detailed description of how Romans punished their servants by throwing them into pools full of lamprey, to be slowly nibbled to death.

Another reason Peaches disdains Dr. Paula is her website.

Why shouldn’t she have a website? he said. Everyone has a website. Our plumber has a website.

She looks vampy, Peaches sniffed. (Translation: Dr. Paula is an attractive woman of a certain age.)

Darling, he said, I’m not paying Dr. Paula seventy-five hundred dollars a year to have sex with me.

You better not be, or she’ll be treating you for missing testicles.

His darling is very feisty and possessive. He finds this endearing. Peaches is all he ever wanted in a wife. He hasn’t had an adulterous thought since they found each other a decade ago on the set of Swamp Foxes. Stipulated: fidelity comes easier in one’s sixties now that the command center has relocated back to the brain after a half century’s residence in the aforementioned testicles.

She was the chief resident at Baptist Memorial, he pointed out.

Uh-huh, Peaches said. And now she takes care of rich retiree golfers for seventy-five hundred dollars a year.

I’m not rich and I don’t golf, he says, mentally appending a touché.

He found Dr. Paula through Jubal Puckett. The Pucketts are their best friends here. Jubal had been to one specialist after another for a back problem. I had so many damn CAT scans, PET scans, MRIs I was radioactive. I was setting off the damn alarms in airports. He was about to go the Mayo Clinic when someone told him about this concierge doctor in nearby Purrell’s Inlet. Jubal had never heard the term concierge doctor, but Purrell’s being a lot closer than Minnesota, he figured he’d give it a shot. By this time, he’d spent more than $7,500 on co-pays alone. And what do you know: Dr. Paula had him back to deep-sea fishing in two weeks.

So when his own doctor dropped dead of a heart attack while training to run a marathon, Jubal pressed him to try Dr. Paula. Outside her office he saw the gleaming, late-model Mercedes S-Class with a Keep America Great bumper sticker. He reminded himself that he had not come to debate politics. He has long despaired of his adopted state’s unquenchable devotion to President Trump and has learned never to initiate a political conversation.

Dr. Paula turned out to be even more attractive than her website photo, exuding a MILFy sexuality.

"I thought Swamp Foxes was great fun," she told him.

He sighed. Swamp Foxes is his least favorite topic of conversation.

Isn’t that how you know Jubal? she asked. Wasn’t it filmed at his plantation?

It was, yes.

Well, I thought it was a hoot and a half.

Kind of you to say so.

He refrained from launching into his usual lamentation about the villainy of the producer and director who sabotaged his screenplay. Over the years, he’s become a local version of the Ancient Mariner, buttonholing strangers to tell them the saga of Swamp Foxes.

You need to let it go, Peaches has told him more than once.

Jubal had correctly praised Dr. Paula’s warm bedside manner. And he very much appreciated her nonjudgmental attitude when it came time for him to mount the scale. She did not say, Whoa! or start humming Henry Mancini’s Baby Elephant Walk.

Are my toes still there? he asked, by way of signaling his awareness that his body mass index was less than ideal. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them.

Dr. Paula laughed. She took out an expensive-looking Montblanc pen and poked each little piggy. One, two, three… yup, all ten, present and accounted for.

He braced for a lecture about diabetic amputation, blindness, and other assorted horrors associated with obesity, but she did not reprove. During the prostate exam, he asked what had brought her here from Charlotte. (He did not particularly care, but he finds that making mundane conversation with the person whose finger is inserted in his rectum mitigates the inherent awkwardness.) She replied that the rat race and traffic had gotten to her. And she had always wanted to be a country doctor. Between the Mercedes and her office suite, which resembled an airline first-class lounge, Dr. Paula is a different breed of country doctor than, say, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.

So, she said, snapping off the latex gloves. Do we want to address the weight issue, or are we okay with it as is?

I didn’t always eat this much, he said. But with the pandemic, I seem to have defaulted into comfort-food mode. He thinks: Defaulted? Dude. You did a swan dive into the deep end of the mac and cheese.

Dr. Stone nodded sympathetically. She said that in her opinion, much of the research into so-called obesity—so-called! He could have kissed her—is grant driven and frankly politically motivated. She smiled in a cheeky way and said, "Well? Do we want do something about it?"

He felt he should at least pretend.

"I

Reviews for Has Anyone Seen My Toes?

[clara53_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hilarious, witty satire (a lot of it political) from page one!.. And I also could relate to the protagonist's (and, I am sure, the author's) affinity for language study, etymology of words, etc., as well as curiosity about it - all presented in that same humorous format, as our hero stumbles through his life's difficulties.

[pomo58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Has Anyone Seen My Toes? from Christopher Buckley is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and groan-inducing. Still very good but largely uneven.Some of the satire was spot on, and I definitely fall into the demographic that would find a lot of it appealing. Yet part way through the book I found myself wishing he cut some of the scenes just a little shorter. I got the point, I appreciated the humor, then I just wanted to move on. Dialogues, quotes, imaginings, they just didn't need to all be so long in order to drive the satiric point home.On the flip side, once I finished the book, and even at times when I had finished a couple chapters and was away from the book, I found what Buckley was doing quite entertaining. So while the actual reading was at times tedious the overall effect was pretty good.I would recommend this book to those who enjoy satire and humor that borders on absurd. I also acknowledge that many will likely prefer the longer scenes that lowered my enjoyment, so there is that.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.